EMD are still alive and kicking...

[Ronnie55]

This could hardly be called a case study, but I recently registered 3 domains in a similar market/niche...

This isn't at all what I did, but just as an example.. it could have been:
1. best moves for basketball
2. best moves for soccer
3. best moves for hockey

For two of them, I got an exact match domain. For one, I had to leave 1 word out because the EMD was taken.

I built all 3 sites identically. It's been 1 month now. Not only is the non-EMD site performing worse than the other two, but it actually ranks higher in google for an exact search of the DOMAIN name...

That's right, google ranks my site highest for the domain name that is missing one word from my keyword phrase. I'm ranking significantly lower for my actual keyword phrase, which my entire homepage was built to target, and for which my SEO plugin is also set to target?


Does it matter in the long run with a brandable domain name that you're going to develop? no. obviously not

Is your google ranking within the first month on a n00b site the most important thing? no

I just wanted to share my findings with you guys. I thought it was pretty astonishing that google literally ranks me higher in a search of the keyword contained in my domain name, even though the exact phrase that I targeted in my homepage article contains an extra word. With that extra word, my ranking is lower...

I'm a n00b, and I don't claim not to be. I'll probably get torn apart for this post. But I'm trying to share some knowledge and hopefully this helps someone.

 

[dfdesigns]

EMD's definitely rank much easier than other domains. From my experience, I would say that it still depends on the quality of your website. Good quality content on a EMD will rank for sure, especially in Bing and Yahoo. I get most of my EMD's to get ranked first page on Bing/Yahoo without even doing SEO.

 

[sydants]

Food for thought: some emd's can be seen as brand names :O

 

[Ronnie55]

Food for thought: some emd's can be seen as brand names :O

true. they're often registered already though. but best case scenario for me is a 2 or 3 word EMD that's also a good brandable name.

 

[sydants]

Yeah sometimes you can pick up expiring ones at godaddy auctions though pretty cheaply. The initial price you'll pay is worth it for the value it contributes to the site. Personally I recommend 2 words max and less than 12 characters to keep it simple.

 

[profitmotive]

inb4 "quit outing bros"

 

[dreamscape]

Well I've been unlucky with one of my websites... had something like:
BuyKeyword1Keyword2.com

It was doing awesome for about 10 months... Then my site was totally nuked by Google after this:

The site had a lot of content and articles, blog posts, etc... related to the products. It also had visitor submitted reviews and ratings from customers that purchased the products as well as a price comparison to help customers find similar products with lower prices... So I'm not sure what made it a "low quality" site.

Hours and hours and days and days of work, not to mention big monies down the drain with a click of a button.

Maybe I was just unlucky and it was just included in the update by mistake...
I'm going to try something similar again very soon.

 

[golan]

EMD are still usually doing great. Until your site grown so big that invites G manual review. Then it falls into hell, unless you have built super duper white portal with super useful content and tons of natural editorial links and social shares.

So I would say, EMD is good either under radar or in the highest echelons, not in the middle.

 

[Ronnie55]

EMD are still usually doing great. Until your site grown so big that invites G manual review. Then it falls into hell, unless you have built super duper white portal with super useful content and tons of natural editorial links and social shares.

So I would say, EMD is good either under radar or in the highest echelons, not in the middle.

Interesting. I haven't made it this far yet with any sites.. interesting though. Makes a lot of sense.

 

[mr_neo]

I find it matters little whether its EMD or not. I care little about it anymore.

It could be a slight difference in the type of links you made for those 3 domains?

 

[dreamscape]

Well I put up a new EMD site about 5 days ago... it was actually on the 2nd page
(230 million results) for the phrase for about 2 days... wouldn't you know it, as of
last night the site is no longer coming up on any of the searches I do.

What a coinkidink...

 

[manihatethis]

I have theory about new sites getting blacklisted too fast. If your niche is developed and you suddenly dominate the SERPS, google triggers a conditional check to see if you did anything funny. Accumulating too many backlinks with no extra traffic is a dead giveaway that you're doing something unnatural. How else would have the links? maybe a half dozen if someone mentions your site in their articles but have 100 over night with no traffic spike is unnatural

On the other hand anything can go viral and accumulate traffic via linking and shares on social media. If you break a barrier in the SERPS then; it would seem okay in that case.